A prison can’t function without its pecking order. Call it what you will, chain of command, hierarchy, rank, it all comes down to power. Who’s got it, who doesn’t. Who’s on top, who’s on bottom. It’s an all-inclusive, endemic culture: wardens, top assistant wardens, captains, sergeants, and rank and file officers. Frontline correctional officers top inmates, and inmates top whomever they can.

Support staff is notched in there somewhere, just one step above inmates. These “civilians”—medical workers, teachers, social workers, chaplains—are viewed by corrections with almost as much suspicion and contempt as inmates. I know firsthand all about that suspicion and contempt from my years teaching high school offenders locked up in an adult county prison. You get the message pretty quickly when time after time you’re kept standing behind some prison gate or security door, waiting in plain view for an officer to buzz you through while he or she finishes joking with their buddy or finally looks up from their crossword puzzle.

Inmates’ lives are dominated by this same top to bottom hierarchy. For them it’s a food chain that is more blatant, more calculating. The only way to survive is to have your heel, in one way or another, on other inmates’ necks. The young men I worked with had an apt image for making it out alive: “We’re all crabs in a pail scrambling to get out, pulling down the guys in front of you, stepping on them, shoving them down to the bottom so you can make it out.” Extortion, physical strength, ruthlessness, a coldhearted distrust of everyone are the “tools” of survival. Without them an inmate’s well-being and safety are in jeopardy.

You might expect that locked up young kids are on the lowest rung of that ladder both on the block and in the general prison population. Certainly their age, undeveloped thinking and decision-making processes, their inability to physically fend for themselves (despite their bluster and bravado) make them more vulnerable to intimidation, abuse, threats, bullying, and physical force.But it goes lower: incarcerated women—what I call the invisible prison population. Despite the fact that more women are being locked up—an 800 percent increase in the last 10 years—you seldom hear what prison life is really like for them (forget the make-believe you see on “Orange is the New Black”).

The prison I worked in is one small example of how women are unfairly treated in lockup. Aside from the brutal fact of female inmates’ increased vulnerability to sexual assault by staff, the women’s unit in this particular prison was more overcrowded than the men’s, and women had limited or no access to any kind of recreational facilities, while their male counterparts had both gym and yard privileges on a daily basis.

Added to the usual indignities experienced by all women imprisoned in the U.S., the female inmates in the county prison where I taught had to endure the callous authority of a male warden. Among the many arbitrary restrictions he imposed (for example at holiday time teachers on the men’s units were allowed to bring in donuts and hot chocolate while permission was denied for the women’s block), he instigated several “cost saving measures:” rationing of toilet paper, and most egregious and insulting, limiting the feminine hygiene products each woman could receive. This has got to be the bottom of the prison hierarchy for locked up women. How could it not be? To have a man dictate how many tampons you’re allowed to use regardless of your body’s needs.

But it’s not. Some women sink even lower in the prison pecking order. As limited as the public’s awareness of female incarceration is, an even more neglected population are those women in solitary confinement. There has been a lot of attention lately to the U.S.’s overuse of solitary confinement. The United Nations Committee on Torture strongly criticized our use of this form of cruel and unusual punishment, making it clear that it was a form of torture—criticism that the U.S. diplomatic delegation sloughed off with America’s usual disdain whenever confronted with its own human rights violations. But even in the media’s coverage of the hearings and its own investigation of solitary confinement abuses one often heard about the sufferings of male inmates but nothing about those women in isolation.

In 2014, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had agreed under some pressure to conduct an “internal audit” on the uses of solitary confinement. Initially no women’s prisons were included on the list of sites to be examined. Under pressure from human rights groups some women’s units were added. However no one was able—or willing—to say exactly which ones. Once again locked up women, this time women held in solitary, didn’t even exist. Solitary Watch, the website which is a fierce advocate for all people held in “special housing units,” called these women “buried.” Another word comes to my mind, one borrowed from repressive Latin American regimes: “disappeared.”

Most of us know at least a few young teens—15, 16, 17 year olds. A son or daughter. A niece or nephew. A neighbor or a friend’s grandchild. We see them around, waiting for the school bus, surfing the sidewalk on a skate board, hanging out at the mall. Despite what they insist, teens are only on the cusp of adulthood, and most of us will do whatever we can to help them make it in the world.

Until, that is, one of those youths gets arrested. Then all that good will disappears. At least that’s the case in over half the states which have yet to change their laws prosecuting young teenagers (under the age of 18) as adults and, if convicted, sending them to adult correctional facilities. Suddenly that young person becomes an exile to all the protections and decencies that communities work hard to provide their children, and she or he enters a world that is blind to the needs and vulnerabilities of every developing adolescent. (This disenfranchisement is made starkly clear by the fact that in some states the parents of those teens are not notified when their children are arrested.)There is nothing nice about a kid in an adult prison or jail—nothing any of us would wish on the young teens that we know.

There are lots of numbers to tell us why these laws are wrong. As the Campaign for Youth Justice states in the conclusion of its report on state-by-state juvenile justice reform, about 250,000 juvenile offenders are tried in adult courts annually and nearly 100,000 youths are placed in adult jails and prisons each year. Yet, as Jessica Sandoval, deputy director of CFYJ, told the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, 95 percent of minors tried in adult courts nationwide are non-violent offenders, a fact that much of the public is not aware of.

Even more shocking, CFYJ reports in its “Key Facts: Youth in the Justice System” that young people housed in adult jails are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than those housed in juvenile detention facilities. Likewise inmates under eighteen make up only one percent of the prison population yet are victims in 21 percent of prison rapes. These grim statistics alone should have all caring adults voicing support for the efforts of child advocacy groups working to amend the laws in the remaining states that treat minors as adults in the criminal justice system.

But even if kids serving time in an adult facility somehow manage to keep themselves physically and sexually safe, the world of adult prison will still harm and harden them. While teaching high school students locked up in an adult correctional facility I saw what prison culture does to teenagers. The constant threat of violence and intimidation; the noise, foul smells and unhealthy food; the chaos and overcrowding; the isolation from family and positive role models; the lack of mental health services. All these factors create an environment that can, and does damage the sturdiest of adults. What kind of harm, then, do those conditions have on a young person still developing physically, emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, and spiritually?

But shouldn’t these kids be held responsible for breaking the law? Yes. That is exactly why those who support changing these laws want to keep younger teens in the juvenile justice system. The adult prison system, the way it is now structured, is more about retribution than rehabilitation. The juvenile system, on the other hand, is designed to help children change behavior and provides them with vital services such as school and substance abuse treatment which support that change. When we lock up minors in adult prisons the inevitable focus of incarceration becomes that of survival and of bitter resentment and retaliation for mistreatment by the criminal justice system. The research supports that conclusion. Kids handled in the adult system are 34 percent more likely to reoffend and their behavior to more quickly escalate into violence than those young people who remain in the juvenile system.

Think of all the teenagers you know or see around you. What wouldn’t you do to help them, to point them in the right direction, to shield them from harm? Think of all the benefits we heap on our children, the advantages we say they all should, must have. Why does all that disappear when a kid makes a mistake and gets arrested? Why suddenly are they any less deserving of our personal and national compassion? The least any of us can do is to support those advocacy groups working for juvenile justice reform and to urge legislators to support laws that save young offenders from growing up in adult prisons.

The numbers are disturbing. During 2008 through 2009, 12 percent or 3,220 of the kids locked up in state or privately run juvenile detention centers reported that they had been sexually victimized by another kid or by facility staff.

Even more disturbing is that 10.3 percent stated they had had sexual contact with an adult staff member. Of that number, 1,150 kids said that sex or sexual contact was forced on them. All this according to the recently released National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC) report mandated by the Department of Justice as part of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Statistics have an odd way of getting to us.

On one hand, they’re just numbers; cut and dry; lifeless; boring to read; easy to lose track of. Yet they’re potent, almost like talismans that draw our attention to the truth beneath them.

I got to thinking.

The high school I went to had about that many kids, 3,000 plus. That was a lot of kids, especially when we packed the gymnasium for a basketball game or got herded into the auditorium for what our teachers felt would be yet another enriching speaker.

3,220 kids are boundless, shot through with life and energy, loud, and, most of the time, interesting and funny (that is if you don’t let them get on your nerves.)

But this report is talking about a different kind of kid.

3,220 locked up, locked away, locked down young people adjudicated to places they don’t want to be, in places that don’t really want them because nobody else wants them. Kids forced one way or another (perhaps just by the fact that they were young, disenfranchised, and in juvenile detention) to have sex or sexual contact mostly with adults.

Adults. The ones hired to take care of them. The ones trusted with their safety and security.

But I’m pretty sure those abused kids weren’t as shocked by their caretakers’ misconduct as the rest of us are. They’ve been letdown by adults all their lives. They’re use to being disappointed. So what else is new?

There’s been a quick and horrified response to the findings of this survey. The remarks I’ve heard and the comments I’ve read have been venomous to the extreme. The staffs of these detention centers have been described as animals, sadists, monsters, predators. “Think about it. Who else would take a job like that?” “What do you expect from a bunch of bullies and psychopaths?”

I’ve been there, and said the same things. When I first started teaching kids at a county penitentiary, I had the correctional staff pegged the same way. I had my own litany of synonyms for “lowlife.”

But it didn’t take me long to see that those correctional officers were just as much victims of a violent, degrading, inhumane system as the young kids I tried to educate and protect in what small ways I could.

COs had the power. They never forgot it. The kids I taught never forgot. And I never forgot it. But that power was really all they did have: power over the powerless in an institution that had the ultimate power to keep the keepers and the kept down.

In reality, every one of us is responsible for every one of those 3,220 kids. We Americans want our jails, our juvenile detention centers, to keep us safe. The system serves at our behest. But, as this report shows (and there have been far too many reports lately tabulating the abuses of our locked up children) the system serves none of us.

Imagine an auditorium full of those 3,220 victimized kids. What could we possibly say to them?